Women's representation in media: who's running the show?

How do television panel shows break down by gender? The majority are heavily male dominated. Graphic by Mark McCormick

How many women journalists are there in media publications and institutions? How does the Daily Mail compare to the Telegraph for female voices? Guardian research shows that many are over-whelmingly male dominated.

Earlier this year, from Monday 13th June to Friday 8th July – before the school summer holidays started, to avoid any skewing affect - Kira Cochrane and a group of researchers carried out a simple count of newspaper bylines. They went through seven daily newspapers in their entirety each day, counting and recording the number of male and female writers, and then calculating the percentage values. Kira explains the process here:

Where the sex of the writer was unclear, and a good amount of research didn't help, the byline was left out of the count. This happened 15 or fewer times, across all the newspapers, in the space of each week, out of more than 3500 bylines altogether in that same time period, so it had, at most, a mild blurring effect on this media snapshot.

We didn't count the names in the games section, weather section, or on cartoons - only written content was included. The data didn't include the names on pieces marked 'edited by' or 'compiled by', or additional reporting or research credits. They did include bylines that appeared at the bottom of the article rather than the top. Where there were joint bylines, each name was included equally in the count. This wasn't a scientific study, but it was an attempt to count every byline in as fair and straightforward a fashion as possible.

At the same time, we were doing a count of the reporters and guests on the Today programme - the regular presenters being left out of the project, on the basis that we know the gender breakdown there: 80/20, male/female. Working from the Today programme records, the male and female guests and reporters who appeared each day were counted up, to get an overall picture of the contributors. If someone appeared on the programme repeatedly in a single show to relay the business or sports news, for instance, they were only counted once, on the grounds that they weren't fronting an entirely new story. Otherwise each name on the Today programme was counted individually.

The average percentage of female reporters was 22.6% - compared to 77.4% of males - in part of the study logging the sex of reporters in a range of national publications and also the reporters and guests of the Today programme.

National papers were all shown to have large gender gaps in byline averages. The Daily Mail and the Guardian recorded the lowest male dominance at 68% male and 72% male respectively. The bar chart below shows the weekly average byline percentage for females by publication.

Panel shows also provided a stark contrast - out of 11 of the Mock the Week shows studied, five were all male creating a show average of 92% male dominance. Any Questions had the highest female representation at 30% of those featured being female. The graphic above shows how the shows break down by gender.

We have gathered the data into a spreadsheet and you are able to examine the findings for yourself. The table below shows the weekly average percentages for male and female bylines recorded over the four week period. Further data for the panel shows, daily and overall averages can be downloaded below.